How to Teach Historical Thinking

Download this free activity to help your students practice thinking like a historian.

One of my favorite books about teaching history is Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts by Sam Wineburg. It was the title that first caught my attention. What is “unnatural” about thinking like a historian? According to WIneburg, historical thinking is something we have to learn, something we have to teach. When students encounter something that claims or appears to be true, he says, their natural response isn't always to question it.

Information Overload — And Not All Of It Is True

We’re living in an era of extraordinary information sharing. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Google come loaded with a nearly endless stream of claims. The problem isn't a shortage of information. It's figuring out what to believe.

Research from the Stanford History Education Group has found that young people struggle to evaluate the credibility of information they find online. In one national study, more than half of high school students accepted a misleading Facebook video as strong evidence for a claim it did not actually substantiate.

Historical thinking offers an antidote. It teaches students that claims need evidence. Evidence has sources. Sources have contexts. Sources can disagree. And sometimes the evidence isn't strong enough to make the claim we want to make. 

Five Questions Historians Ask

Getting students to think like a historian isn’t easy to do. But the following questions will help them start to evaluate what they are reading and understand that not everything they read or watch is true. 

1. Sourcing: Who made this? 

Before students dive into any document, photograph, or artifact, teach them to look at its source. Who created it? When? Why? For what audience? A diary and a newspaper article probably describe the same event very differently. That's not a problem. That's history. But it’s something students should understand. 

2. Contextualizing: What was happening at the time? 

Evidence doesn't exist in a vacuum. What was happening when this source was created? What might people at the time have known, believed, feared, or wanted? Context can completely change how we understand evidence.

3. Corroborating: What does the other evidence say? 

One source is a clue. Several sources can become a case. Teach students to compare evidence. Where do sources agree? Where do they disagree? Does one source strengthen another? Does new evidence change the story?

4. Close Reading: What does this document actually say? 

Historians slow down. They notice words, details, omissions, biases, claims, and contradictions. They ask questions and stop when something doesn't make sense. Reading like a historian means refusing to race past the evidence without reckoning with it.

5. Claim Making: What can the evidence actually prove? 

This may be the most important skill that history teaches. Give students evidence and ask: What can you claim? Then ask: Can your evidence support that? Students begin to understand that having an opinion isn't the same thing as making an evidence-based argument.

Examining a History Mystery: Molly Pitcher

Have you ever heard of Molly Pitcher? She fought in the American Revolution. Maybe. Many students were taught that Molly Pitcher carried water to soldiers during the Battle of Monmouth and then courageously took her husband's place at a cannon.

It’s a great story. But was Molly Pitcher a real person? Our 100% History Detectives: The Mysterious Molly P. turns the story of Molly Pitcher into a ready-to-teach historical investigation. Students examine evidence, analyze primary sources, compare accounts, and decide Molly Pitcher’s historical fate for themselves.

Along the way, they discover something historians understand deeply: the past doesn't always hand us a clean answer. Sometimes evidence conflicts. Sometimes evidence is incomplete. Sometimes the most historically responsible answer is: We don't know for sure. And that's not failure. That's responsible historical thinking.

There is a year's worth of this kind of historical thinking built into the 100% History Detectives series. Eight books and eight history units that turn important pieces of American history into a series of investigations so students learn history and learn how to think like historians. Start with The Mysterious Molly Pitcher or explore the entire 100% History Detectives series.

Historical thinking may be an unnatural act, but teaching it doesn't have to be. Let’s train our kids to be 100% History Detectives.

Free This Week

Want to try historical thinking in your classroom?

Download our Think Like a Historian Handout absolutely free.

If your students want to learn more about Molly Pitcher, take a look at our read-aloud book and unit — it’s a great mystery that requires some serious historical thinking!

Steve Seely | Co-founder, 241 Books